VIFF 2008 Dragons & Tigers Award Winners

For the 15th year running, the Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema to a new director from the Asia-Pacific region is given to a creative and innovative film, made early in the director's career, which has not yet won significant international recognition. Once again we are grateful to Brad Birarda for continuing to sponsor this $10,000 award, and the series as a whole.

The distinguished jury for the 2008 award comprised: Mr ICHIYAMA Shozo, artistic director of the Tokyo FilmEx festival and programmer for Cinema Digital Seoul, who is also a producer for Office Kitano; Ms Elisabeth LEQUERET, critic for Cahiers du Cinema and Radio France Internationale and a programmer for the San Francisco International Film Festival; and Thai director Mr Pen-ek RATANARUANG, whose most recent feature is Ploy.

This year's eight nominees were:
GERMAN + RAIN (Yokohama Satoko) - Japan, International Premiere
KAZA-AANA (Uchida Nobutero) - Japan, International Premiere LUCKY 7 (Sun Koh, K Rajagopal, Boo Junfeng, Brian Gothong Tan, Chew Tze Chuan, Ho Tzu Nyen, Tania Sng) - Singapore
mime-mime (Sode Yukiko) - Japan, International Premiere
PERFECT LIFE (Emily Tang) - China, North American Premiere
SWEET FOOD CITY (Gao Wengdong) - China, North American Premiere SYNCHING BLUE (Seo Won-Tae) - South Korea, Canadian Premiere THE "THANK YOU" GIRLS (Charliebebs Gohetia) - The Philippines, International Premiere

The jury has issued the following statement:

"The eight films we watched were not all perfect, and probably none of them was a masterpiece. But we enjoyed all of them in different ways, and found in each of them signs of great energy and talent."

"We want to single out two particularly strong films for Special
Mentions:

German + Rain by Ms YOKOHAMA Satoko from Japan.
The main character is disturbing, yet unexpectedly fascinating. Taken with naturalistic performances from the entire cast, this is a strangely moving film.

Sweet Food City by GAO Wendong from China.
For its use of an incredible location, and the very clever way it combines elements of documentary with fiction.

This year's Dragons and Tigers Award goes to:

Perfect Life by Ms Emily TANG from Hong Kong/China.
"For the way it captures the harshness of Chinese reality through its fictional protagonist, and for the subtlety of its wonderfully free storytelling."

Perfect Life will be screened again on Friday, October 3 at 3:45pm at Vancity Theatre.